Cold Mountain Part 11

-Put that thing away, Inman said.

Both men cut their eyes in his direction, and when they did, Tildy reached and plucked Veasey's pistol from his hand.

The man looked at Veasey and pursed his lips.

-You a s.h.i.t-eating dog, he said to Tildy. Then to Veasey he said, She just saved your a.s.s from getting killed, on account of if I shoot you unarmed the law will be on me.

Veasey said to no one in particular, I want my pistol back.

-Time to shut up, Inman said. He spoke to Veasey but did not take his eyes from the man with the wen.

2004-3-6.

.83.

-I'll not do it, the man said.

Inman said nothing.

The man still held the pistol aimed at Veasey's head and seemed not to see a way to bring their contest to a close.

-I expect I'll have to give you a beating with it instead, he said, giving the pistol a little shake in Veasey's face.

-Hey, Inman said.

The man looked, and now the LeMat's was out, lying on its side on the table, Inman's hand resting atop it.

With the forefinger of his free hand Inman signed for the man to step away.

The man stood a long time looking at the LeMat's, and the longer he looked the more calm Inman became. Finally the man holstered his pistol and walked off, muttering as he traversed the room. He drew together his party and went out the door.

-Give me that, Inman said to Tildy. She reached him Veasey's pistol, and he stuck it in his pant waist.

-You're set on getting us both killed, Inman said to Veasey.

-Not likely, Veasey said. It was two on one.

-No, it wasn't. Don't look to me to back you.

-Well, you just did.

-All the same, don't look to me. The next one I might let have you.

Veasey grinned and said, I reckon not. Then he and Tildy rose and left, his arm about what slight indentation she had for waist. Inman moved his chair back against a wall so that he could not be come at from behind. He raised his empty gla.s.s to a man in an ap.r.o.n who looked to be a barkeep.

-That's a big fireplace, Inman said to the man when he came with the bottle.

-In the summer we whitewash it and put a bedstead in it. It's the coolest place to sleep you've ever seen, the man said.

-Well, Inman said.

-You taking dinner?

-I will. I've been dining in the woods for some days now.

-Be ready in about two hours, the man said.

As the day wore out, a few other travelers came. A pair of old men on their way to sell a wagonload of produce at the nearby market town. A white-headed peddler pushing a barrow of skillets, spools 2004-3-6.

.84.

of ribbon, tin cups, little bottles blown from brown gla.s.s containing laudanum and various tinctures of herbs in alcohol. A few other a.s.sorted wanderers. They all ganged up and talked and drank together at a long table. They spoke of the old droving days with great nostalgia. One man said, Oh, I've driv many a beeve through here. Another talked of a great flock of geese and ducks he had escorted down this way one time, and he said that every few days they had to dip the birds' legs in hot tar and then in sand to keep them from wearing the webs off their feet. Every man had tales to tell.

Inman, though, perched alone through the late afternoon on a stool at the dry end of the room, sipping brown liquor that was claimed to be bourbon but lacked all the usual qualities of that drink other than the alcohol. He looked irritably into the pointless fire at the far end of the room. The others glanced at him frequently, a certain amount of worry in their looks. Their faces were mirrors in which Inman could see himself as they evidently did, as a man that might just shoot you.

Inman had paid five dollars Confederate to sleep in the hayloft and five more for supper, which, when it came, was a bowl not more than half full of a dark stew of rabbit and chicken with a wedge of corn bread. Even accounting for the worthlessness of the money, that was still high tariff.

After supper, in the last of twilight, he stood at the stable door under a shake-shingled overhang at the back of the inn. He leaned against a hitching rail and watched the rain fall in heavy drops into the mud of the wagon yard and the road. It came on a cool northerly wind. Two lanterns hung from the rafters. Their light seemed diluted by the water and served little purpose other than to glint off puddles and to cast everything into gloomy contrast. All the highlights and points of things were picked out by the light. Rain dripped steadily off the overhang, and Inman thought of Longstreet's comment at Fredericksburg: Federals falling as steady as rain dripping off an eave. In his mind Inman said, It was nothing like that, no similarity.

The wood of the way station was old, the grain raised, feeling powdery against his palm, even in the damp. In a corral across the mud road, two wet horses stood in the rain, heads down. Inside the stable, others more fortunate stood in stalls, but they were such horses as will snap at you when you pa.s.s by them, and Inman turned and watched as a claybank mare bit a collop of flesh as big as a walnut out of the upper arm of one of the old market-bound men pa.s.sing through the hall on the way to his room.

After a time of standing and staring with unfocused eyes out into the darkening landscape, Inman decided just to go to bed and rise early and head on. He climbed the ladder into the loft and found that his roommate was already there. It was the white-headed peddler, the other travelers having paid for beds. The man had carried the various satchels and cases from his barrow up into the loft. Inman threw his own packs into a heap under the eaves. He lounged back into a pile of hay just outside the circle of yellow light from the oil lamp that the peddler had brought up from the inn. It hung by its bale from a long nail driven into a roof beam.

Inman watched as the man sat under the wavery light and removed his boots and socks. His feet were blistered at heel and toe in tight b.l.o.o.d.y bubbles of skin. From a leather case he took a fleam.

The lantern light caught the bright steel of the keen instrument and it shone out against the darkness like a barb of dull gold. The man punched at his feet with it until he had opened up the blisters and let the pink fluid run out, pressing with his fingers. He put his boots back on and said, There. He wiped his fingers on his pants and stood and took hobbled steps back and forth across the loft, walking with great tenderness and care.

-There, he said again.

-You've been walking as hard as I have, Inman said.

2004-3-6.

.85.

-I reckon.

The man pulled out a watch from his coat pocket and looked at its face. He tapped it with a knuckle and held it to his ear.

-I'd have thought later, he said. It's but six.

The peddler took the lamp down from its nail and set it on the floor and joined Inman in the haystack. They sat a minute in silence. The rain beat on the shakes over their heads and reminded them what fine things a tight roof and a stack of dry straw are. The yellow circle of lamplight served to make the vast loft more snug. All the s.p.a.ce beyond its radius ended abruptly in blackness, as if the light had scribed the dimensions of a room close around them. They could hear below them the shift of horses in stalls, the outblow of their breath. The drowsy murmur of other people talking.

The peddler dug around in his case again and pulled out a big pewter flask. He unstoppered it and took a long drink. Then he held it out to Inman.

-This is store liquor from Tennessee, he said.

Inman took a pull and it was good, flavors of smoke and leather and other things brown and rich.

Outside, the rain gathered up and wind rose in the darkness and whistled in the shakes. Boards creaked. The light jumped and guttered in the draught.

The night was storm-stridden for hours. They drank through boom and flash, sprawled in the straw, telling tales of exile and brute wandering.

Inman found that the man's name was Odell, and by the lamplight Inman could see that he was far from old, though his hair was white as a goose. At most he was just a little farther along in the course of time than Inman.

-I've not had an easy life. Far from it, Odell said. And don't let what I am now stand for what I always was. I was born rich. By rights I ought to be ready to come into a planter's inheritance of cotton and indigo down in south Georgia. A fortune. It could be any time now, for my daddy's old.

He could already be dead for all I know, the old s.h.i.tpike. It would all have been mine. Of land, too much to bother measuring in acres. The borders of it run ten miles across going one way and six going the other. That, and more n.i.g.g.e.rs than you could find useful work for. All mine.

-Why aren't you there? Inman said.

The answer to his question took much of the evening, and when the lantern ran out of oil, the peddler talked out his gloomy tale of careless love into the dark. Odell had been a happy boy. Oldest son.

Raised and educated to take over the plantation. The problem was, as a young man of twenty, he had fallen into unseemly love with one of the black housemaids, a slave named Lucinda. As he told it, he loved her far past the point of lunacy, for as everyone knew, just to have loved her at all was a mark of an unsound mind. She was, at the beginning, a woman of twenty-two, an octoroon. Skin not much darker than the color of a tanned deerhide, he said. She was a yellow rose.

To complicate the matter, Odell had not long been married to the daughter of the county's other major planter. So good had been his prospects that he had had the choice of girls from far and near.

The one he chose for wife was small and frail, given to spells of nervous fatigue, spent entire afternoons swooned on the fainting couch in the parlor. But she was beautiful in a transparent way, and he had wanted her above all others. After the wedding, though, once he got the heaps of crinolines off her, there seemed to be just about nothing left. She was so slight and wispish. He 2004-3-6.

.86.

found little there to keep his mind from wandering.

The whole family lived in the big house-Odell, his new little wife, his parents, his brother, a sister.

Odell's duties were light, his father not yet having reached the point where he was ready to let go any of his powers.

Not that his father possessed any great mastery of the skills of landownership, for his primary accomplishment in life was successfully affecting a taste for absinthe over whiskey ever since a visit to France as a young man.

With little else to fill his mind, Odell spent much time reading Scott. In the cool months he hunted and in the warm he fished. He developed an interest in horse breeding. He became bored.

Lucinda came into the household as a result of a complicated set of gambling winnings his father acc.u.mulated on an autumn bear hunt. As a result of the evening card play, great numbers of hogs, several families of slaves, a saddle horse, a kennelful of bird dogs, a fine English-made shotgun, and Lucinda changed hands. The day she was delivered by her previous owner, she carried nothing but a square of cloth, the ends tied up around all her personal goods so that the bundle was no bigger than a pumpkin.

She was put to work in the kitchen, and that is where Odell first saw her. He walked into the room and fell in love that moment with the brittle blackness of her hair, the fine bones of her hands and feet and ankles, the way her skin stretched tight across her collarbone. She was barefoot, and Odell told Inman that as he stood there looking down at her pretty little feet he wished his wife was dead.

For months afterward, he spent much of his time sitting in a chair in the stove corner drinking coffee and mooning over Lucinda until everyone in the house knew the way things stood. One day his father took him aside and advised settling the matter by taking her into an outbuilding and, as he put it, laying the jemson to her.

Odell was appalled. He was in love, he explained.

His father laughed. I've raised a fool, he said.

The next day Odell's father rented out Lucinda to a family on the far side of the county. They were farmers of small means, unable to buy slaves of their own. They paid Odell's father for her labor and used her for field-work, milking, carrying wood. Whatever needed doing.

Odell fell into despair. He spent many a day lying abed. Or roving around the county, drinking and gambling. Until he discovered that two days a week, the farmer's wife had Lucinda carry eggs into town to sell.

Odell would rise on those mornings, suddenly bright in his mood as a man could be, and announce that he was going out hunting. He would have a horse saddled, a charged shotgun in a scabbard, a pair of dogs. He would vault onto the horse from the porch and ride for miles at a canter, the dogs loping along, roaming out into the woods to investigate smells with as much glee as if they were actually hunting. He would ride into town, through it, out the other side, and on down the road until he met Lucinda walking barefoot, a basket of eggs on her arm. He would dismount and walk beside her. Take her basket and carry it for her. Would try to find a suitable topic for conversation. Never once in those first months did he try to draw her into the woods. She would beg him to leave her be, for his sake and for her own. At the edge of town he would give her back the basket and take her hand in his, both their heads bent down at parting.

Eventually, of course, Odell did find himself drawing her into the woods and down into a bed of pine 2004-3-6.

.87.

straw. After that he began going to her cabin several nights a month. He would hobble his horse in the woods and tie his dogs to a tree. When he entered the clearing in the pinewoods where her cabin stood, she would run to him in a thin nightshirt and he would clasp her to him and then lead her inside to lie with her until just before the dawn of day.

He stayed away from home under various pretexts, chief of which was c.o.o.n hunting, and soon every slave in the area knew that Odell would pay top dollar for fresh-killed c.o.o.n. If he could, he would buy one on the way home to prove out his story of night hunting. Otherwise he would return to the house bemoaning his lack of skill in shooting, the greenness of his dogs, the increasing rareness of game.

This went on for a year. Then one night Lucinda informed him that she was pregnant. At this, Odell could bear it no more, and the next day he went to his father, met with him in what was called his study, though all he ever studied there were the big ledgers of the plantation. They stood together by the fireplace. Odell offered to buy Lucinda off of him. He would pay any price named, no d.i.c.kering.

His father sat blinking in amazement. Let me make sure I'm understanding this, he said. Are you buying this n.i.g.g.e.r for the fieldwork or the p.u.s.s.y?

Odell stood and struck his father a hard blow to his left ear. The old man fell and then rose and fell again. He bled from his ear hole. Help! he hollered.

Odell spent the next week locked in a canning house, bruised about the head and ribs from the beating he had taken at the hands of his younger brother and his father's foreman. On the second day his father came to the door and spoke through a crack, saying, I've sold that b.i.t.c.h to Mississippi.

Odell flung himself against the door again and again. He bayed through that night like one of his c.o.o.n dogs and then off and on periodically for the next several days.

When he became too weary to howl, his father unlocked the door. Odell staggered out, blinking, into the light. I believe you have learned your lesson, his father said, and he strode away toward the lower fields, flicking at weed heads and wildflowers with his plaited crop.

Odell walked into the house and packed a satchel of clothes. From the safe box in his father's office he took all the cash he could find-a sizable pouch of gold pieces and a stack of paper bills. He went to his mother's room and took a diamond and ruby brooch, an emerald ring, several strings of pearls.

He went and saddled his horse and rode out toward Mississippi.

In the years before the war, he searched the cotton states until he had worn out three horses and exhausted his store of valuables. But he had yet to find Lucinda, and he had never set foot on home ground again.

In a sense, he was still searching. This was the reason that, when it became necessary to make money, he chose a traveling life. His fortunes in business had eventually fallen from tradesman with horse and wagon to tinker pushing a barrow. He had but few more downward steps to go and could picture himself soon dragging some wheelless sledge or travois, that or selling little trinkets from a pack on his back.

When the tale was done, Inman and Odell found they had finished the flask of liquor. Odell went to his packs of goods and brought back two little bottles of patent medicine, mostly grain alcohol. They sat and sipped at it, and after a time Odell said, You've never seen the like of meanness I have. He told of his travels in Mississippi looking for Lucinda, sights that made him fear that she had already pa.s.sed on into the next world in some horrible and b.l.o.o.d.y way. And sights that made him fear that she had not. He told of n.i.g.g.e.rs burnt alive. Of them having ears and fingers docked for various misdemeanors. The worst such punishment he came upon was near Natchez. He was going down a 2004-3-6.

.88.

lonely road near the river. Off in the woods he heard a turmoil of buzzards, a high wail. He took his shotgun and went investigating, and what he found was a woman in a cage made of bean poles beneath a liveoak. The tree was dusky with buzzards. They roosted on the cage and picked at the woman inside. They had pulled out one of her eyes already and had torn strips of hide from her back and arms.

When she saw Odell out of her one eye she hollered, Shoot me. But Odell fired off both barrels up into the tree. Buzzards. .h.i.t the ground all about and the rest took lumbering flight. Odell had the sudden fear that the woman was Lucinda. He went to her and broke the cage open with the gun b.u.t.t and drew her out. He laid her on the ground and gave her water. He had no idea what he intended to do, but before he could decide, the woman vomited blood and died. He looked at her and touched her feet and her collarbone and her hair, but she could not have been Lucinda. She was different-colored and her feet were knotted.

When Odell finished talking he was drunk and sat blotting at his eyes with his shirt cuff.

-It's a feverish world, Inman said, for lack of better comment.

When morning came up grey and foggy, Inman left the burnt inn and hit the road. Veasey soon followed. He had a thin razor cut under one eye that still wept a trail of blood down his cheek, and he kept wiping at it with his coat sleeve.

-Rough night? Inman said.

-She meant no real harm. This razor scratch came by way of me being too firm in haggling over price for her staying the night. At least my greatest fear went happily unrealized, that she would lay that blade to the limb of my manhood.

-Well, I hope the night was worth it.